CRSQ Archive

How Do
We Know What We Know?

by Lane
P. Lester, Ph.D.

Creation Research
Society Quarterly 32(2) 1995

Each one of us knows lots
of things. We know our name. We know our address. We know the sum of
two plus two. We know which political party is best for the country...
hmm. It seems that some people know things that are the opposite from
what other people know. For example, many people know that evolution
is the correct explanation for the history of life. But many other people
know that creation is the correct explanation. How is it possible
for different people to know different things? What does it mean to
know something?

Perhaps we could agree that
to know something is to be personally convinced of its truth. Notice
the personal element here: knowing something doesn't make it true; it
only means that we consider it to be true. The fact that some people
know things that are the opposite from what other people know means
that some people know things that are false!

Whether true or false, how
do we come to know things? There are really only two ways: personal
experience or someone tells us.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Each of us knows many things
we learned on our own. Let me give you some examples of mine:

Stubbing your toe is
painful. Knowledge like this we pick up early in life.

Rolling through a stop
sign will get you a traffic ticket.

Actually, I had to experience
this twice before I really knew it.

Accepting Christ provides
benefits in this life. I believe it was a former pastor of mine who
pointed out that one of the benefits is that you associate with a
better class of people! More seriously, I have the benefit of seeing
my prayers answered.

Passing electricity through
water produces both hydrogen and oxygen gases. Perhaps in some science
class, you also performed this classic experiment with a battery,
wires, and test tubes.

SOMEONE TELLS US

If you know something and
you didn't experience it yourself, someone had to tell you. Here are
a few examples:

The word "cat"
is spelled "c-a-t." For the most part, education involves
someone telling you things, either orally or in print.

The speed limit on the
expressway is 55 m.p.h. If you don't learn this from the printed sign,
a policeman will be glad to explain it to you both orally and
in print.

Accepting Christ gives
me eternal life. I haven't experienced the full truth of this yet,
but God has told me in the Bible that it is so.

Hydrogen is the smallest
element. You and I lack the equipment and knowledge to determine the
truth of this scientific fact, so we have to learn it from a science
book.

CAN YOU TRUST YOUR OWN
EYES?

In general, we are more
willing to believe what we learn from personal experience than what
someone tells us. But can we always believe what personal experience
tells us? Would anything make you doubt the evidence of your senses?
Imagine that you are walking along a busy sidewalk that fronts a large
park. Out in the park you see a flying saucer descend and land. Would
you immediately begin exclaiming to others about your discovery? I think
I would first glance around and see if anyone else was experiencing
the same thing. On the other hand, if the landing craft were a helicopter,
there would be no reason to doubt what my eyes had told me.

The general principle here
is that we expect to see the commonplace and not the unusual. Indeed,
our senses may even lie to us based on what we expect to be true. A
good example of this comes from the life of Jesus when he cries out,
"Father, glorify your name! Then a voice came from heaven, 'I have
glorified it, and will glorify it again.' The crowd that was there and
heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him."
(John 12:28-29 NIV)

WHOM DO YOU BELIEVE?

What about the things we
know because someone has told us? Remember that we're defining "know"
as "being personally convinced of the truth of something."
Not everything that we're told is the truth, is it? What is it that
makes you more inclined to believe some people than others, to add what
they say to the things you know? Here's a short list of pairs of individuals
who tell us things:

casual acquaintances
and best friends

philosophy professors
and science professors

newspaper reporters and
television reporters - pastors and God (Bible)

What determines how readily
you would be to believe each of the above persons when they tell you
something is true? Would you be more likely to believe one member rather
than another in each of the above pairs? How long you've known the person
might be one factor, and you would probably be more likely to believe
your best friend than you would a casual acquaintance. In my case, there
would be a problem because, when I was growing up, my best friend was
a compulsive liar. A really nice guy, mind you, but he had a problem
with the truth.

What about those two professors?
If a science professor told you something about science, and the philosophy
prof told you the opposite, you'd be more likely to believe the scientist,
wouldn't you? So here's another factor in our willingness to believe
what we're told: the expertise of the person making the statement.

Ah, but what if two equally
knowledgeable people tell you opposite things, what then? This is a
dilemma with which I often have to deal in questions about the creation/evolution
controversy. Sure, I'm a scientist, but I certainly don't know all of
science! My specialty is genetics, and I've never even had a course
in geology. How do I evaluate the competing claims of evolutionist geologists
and creationist geologists? Sometimes I have to choose on the basis
of philosophy rather than science: I choose to believe the Christian
rather than the atheist. This is not as nonrational as it may first
appear. We all live our lives based on some set of assumptions of what
is true, and that set of assumptions affects our decisions about many
things. A person with a false philosophy will be drawn infallibly into
false conclusions about important matters.

The pair of reporters in
our list brings us to the question of how does the fact of something
being printed affect our willingness to believe it? It seems that we're
more ready to believe something that's printed than something that is
just spoken, so the newspaper reporter might get more credibility than
the TV journalist. Of course, Peter Jennings does look awfully sincere!

Seriously now, does something
being printed mean that it is more likely to be true? Sometimes yes,
and sometimes no. Sometimes all it takes to get something published
is money. We need a healthy skepticism for both what we hear and what
we read.

SCIENCE - A WAY OF KNOWING

Science is a very important
way for coming to know things. Some of this scientific knowledge can
come from personal experience, but almost all of it will come from being
told by someone else. Even the science a scientist knows has come mostly
from being told: through periodicals, books, meetings, etc.

Even though the achievements
of science today seem very modern, the modern way of doing science actually
started in the 1600s. Although it's not mentioned much and maybe hard
to believe, most of the founders of modern science believed in a personal
God who had created the universe. Their belief that the Creation was
the result of intelligent design gave them confidence that they could
study it and discover truth about it.

Because science is such
an important path to knowledge and because science is so intimately
associated with origins, it's important to understand something about
it. Plainly stated, science proceeds by making and testing
hypotheses. Scientists observe things, and then they try to explain
their observations. Those explanations are called hypotheses. A hypothesis
is a tentative explanation for observations, an "educated guess."

Making hypotheses about
things is only the first step; much more difficult is the second step:
testing hypotheses. The scientist has to design an experiment that will
indicate whether the hypothesis is correct or not. Let's look at an
actual example.

European eels reproduce
in the Sargasso Sea, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. They migrate to freshwater
streams where they spend most of their lives.. How do they find those
freshwater streams from the ocean? Some scientists hypothesized that
the eels are able to sense the chemical composition of freshwater. They
designed an experiment to test that hypothesis, using bottles of water
leading through tubing to a separate box for each bottle and then to
a common box. Each bottle held a different kind of water: tap, distilled,
salt, fresh (from a stream). Baby eels were placed in the common box
from which they could swim through the tubes to one of the boxes holding
a particular kind of water. The eels showed no preference for tap water
over salt, but most of them swam into the box that contain natural freshwater.
These results supported the hypothesis that the eels are able to detect
the chemical nature of freshwater.

IS THE STUDY OF ORIGINS
SCIENTIFIC?

There are hundreds (thousands?)
of scientists studying origins: the origin of the universe, the origin
of the earth, the origin of life, and the origin of species. Surely,
the study of origins is scientific! Isn't it? Well, it depends on what
you mean by science. If you mean the kind of science done by those studying
the eels, the answer is no.

The late Dr. Richard Bliss,
a great educator, explained the distinction better than anyone else
when he coined the word "operation science" to contrast with
"origins science." Operation science is what is done when
scientists are trying to learn how something works, how it "operates."
They can gather observations, make hypotheses, and test those hypotheses
with experiments. Scientists who study origins can also gather observations,
such as studying the stars or collecting fossils. They also can make
educated guesses about what those observations mean in terms of origins.
But, with few exceptions, they cannot design experiments that will determine
what happened in the prehistoric past. This is the same problem faced
by the forensic scientist. He or she can gather clues: fingerprints,
bloodstains, fibers, etc. Using that evidence, it is possible to suggest
what took place, but there is no experiment that can be done to determine
whether or not that suggestion is correct.

So while scientists can
provide us with valuable information about events that happened a long
time ago, they cannot provide us with answers that are as final as those
about things taking place today. Because of that uncertainty, we can
expect the philosophy of a scientist (Conservative Christian, Liberal
Christian, Orthodox Jew, Reformed Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist) to affect
the conclusions they'll make. Whom will you believe?

FURTHER READING

Creation Research Society
Quarterly, Creation
Research Society, P.O. Box 969, Ashland, OH 44805-0969, $20 per year,
$15 for students. The Creation Research Society is the international
creation organization for scientists and those interested in science.
Articles range from general interest to highly scientific.

Acts and Facts,
Institute for Creation Research, Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021, donations
appreciated. News about ICR, a group of creation scientists. Includes
articles on Biblical and scientific topics.

What Is Creation Science?,
Henry M. Morris and Gary. E. Parker, Master Books. Good overview of
the creation-evolution controversy.

The following are available
from the Creation Research Society:

_Starlight and Time: Solving
the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe_, D. Russell Humphreys,
Master Books. An exciting new model for the origin of the universe,
which denies neither the observations of scientists nor the truth of
the Bible.